Stats Tracking Lead

The NBA is committed to providing a safe and healthy workplace.  To safeguard our employees and their families, our visitors, and the broader community from COVID-19, and in consideration of recommendations from health authorities and the NBA’s own advisors, any individual working onsite in our New York and New Jersey offices must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The NBA will discuss accommodations for individuals who cannot be vaccinated due to a medical reason or sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance.

Position Summary:

The NBA’s Stats Team is looking for a team leader to oversee several key aspects of the Stats Team’s high priority business goals. The role is a part of a diverse, cross functional team. Even though team members have many different skills and backgrounds, every member of the Stats Team shares a passion for the mission of educating and engaging fans with basketball data.

The ideal candidate loves to deliver customer success while also having a vision for long term software development and data science roadmaps. If you’re a great communicator with an exceptional attention to detail that loves to work with many different departments and types of customers, this could be the job for you.

Major Responsibilities:

• Help lead the support, operation, and development of the Stats Team’s technical infrastructure to ingest, process and deliver live player tracking data.
• Effectively manage a cross-functional team and develop the individual talents of team members.
• Improve customer success by driving adoption of Stats products and helping resolve customer issues for customers both inside and outside the NBA organization.
• Listen to customers and recognize opportunities to build new products and features that solve customer problems and put together the business cases for these opportunities. 
• Oversee Stats Team systems and vendors who deploy software/hardware in NBA arenas and work with other NBA departments that support these initiatives.
• Understand the latest industry trends to effectively contribute to the definition and development of the Stats Team’s overall data delivery systems that power fan-facing NBA digital products and share data with partners.
• Oversee the data distribution technologies that deliver data to NBA partners, teams and broadcasters.
• Be a leader that works across departments to gather requirements and help prioritize the Stats Team’s roadmap.
• Work with other development team leaders to effectively integrate new technical infrastructure with existing systems to scale efficiently and ultimately build compelling digital products.
• Work with the NBA Digital Product Team to help create new stats features on NBA digital products through the entire software development process from ideation to production release.
• Collaborate across NBA departments, both technical and non-technical, to help all NBA departments effectively use stats data.
• Help translate and refine digital product feature requirements with NBA engineers.
• Serve as lead for all systems and data feeds provided to NBA, WNBA & G League teams.
• Work with broadcasters and NBA content teams to supply relevant statistical information that supports the content creation process.
• Gather feedback from broadcasters and NBA content teams to design tools and systems that will more effectively and efficiently inject stats into content to better engage and educate fans.

Required Skills

• 8+ years of experience within the sports technology industry and/or software development and management
• Extensive experience with product or project management
• Experience working on consumer facing digital products.
• Experience managing software development teams and software development projects.
• Experience managing cloud-native, distributed systems that involve low latency streamed data is a plus.
• Programming experience in Python or .NET and experience with development on major cloud platforms
• Experience with the full product development process from ideation through development and production release.
• Comfortable with making presentations and able to adjust communication styles to effectively work across many different groups.
• Basketball experience is required.
• Display an aptitude for taking initiative to go above and beyond.
• Perform quality work within deadlines with or without direct supervision.
• Work effectively as a team contributor on all assignments.
• Ready and willing to learn from other members of our team.
• Detail oriented with a desire for seeing projects through to completion.
• Work independently while understanding the necessity for communicating and coordinating work efforts with other employees and organizations.

The NBA does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms or any other third parties. Any unsolicited resume sent to the NBA will be considered NBA property, and the NBA will not pay a fee should it hire the subject of any unsolicited resume. 

The NBA considers applicants for all positions on the basis of merit, qualifications, and business needs, and without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, alienage or citizenship status, ancestry, marital status, genetic predisposition or carrier status, veteran status, familial status, status as a victim of domestic violence, or any other status or characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

About the NBA

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a global sports and media organization with the mission to inspire and connect people everywhere through the power of basketball.  Built around five professional sports leagues:  the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, NBA 2K League and Basketball Africa League, the NBA has established a major international presence with games and programming available in 215 countries and territories in more than 50 languages, and merchandise for sale in more than 200 countries and territories on all seven continents.  NBA rosters at the start of the 2021-22 season featured a record 121 international players from 40 countries.  NBA Digital’s assets include NBA TV, NBA.com, the NBA App and NBA League Pass.  The NBA has created one of the largest social media communities in the world, with 2.1 billion likes and followers globally across all league, team, and player platforms.  Through NBA Cares, the league addresses important social issues by working with internationally recognized youth-serving organizations that support education, youth and family development, and health-related causes.